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Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is a series of e-book readers produced by Amazon.com. Amazon Kindle enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media via wireless networking. The hardware platform, developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126, began as a single device and now comprises a range of devices — most using an E Ink electronic paper display capable of rendering 16 tones to simulate reading on paper while minimizing power consumption.

The Kindle name was devised by branding consultant Michael Cronan who was asked by Lab 126 to name the product. Cronan and partner Karin Hibma suggested Kindle, meaning to light a fire. They felt this was an apt metaphor for reading and intellectual excitement.

Kindle hardware has evolved from the original Kindle introduced in 2007 and a Kindle DX line (with a larger screen) introduced in 2009. Announced in September 2011, the range now includes devices with keyboards (Kindle Keyboard), devices...

326 Recent Stories

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday that paid apps like those found on the iPhone, Android and iPad could help financially troubled news organizations, but he didn't have anything positive to say abo...

Following similar moves by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Borders has announced that it will also be cutting the prices on some of its e-readers. Beginning Wednesday, September 1, the prices of the Kobo e-reader and the Aluratek Libre eBook Pro will drop...

Bad news for everyone out there who was eager to hold the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (that exceedingly portable 20-volume set of wordy goodness): Thanks to the rise of the Internet, the next OED will probably be online-only. Grant...

The new, sleeker Kindle may be a relatively minor upgrade compared to its predecessor, but it's making an impact where it counts the most: sales. According to Amazon, the new Kindle has been selling faster than any of its previous iterations in its f...

Barnes & Noble has reported a loss of $62.5 million for its first fiscal quarter ending July 31, compared to a profit of $12.3 million the year before, and despite a 21% increase in year-over-year revenue to $1.4 billion. Unsurprisingly, sales at Bar...

Amazon is hiring a ton of hardware people, and sources close to the company say that it plans to expand beyond the Kindle e-reader to make new kinds of gadgets to help customers access the content it sells. Most likely, those gadgets would include au...

Several years after the launch of its online e-book store in the U.S., a Kindle Store has finally opened in the UK. The store features more than 400,000 titles (compared to the U.S.'s roughly 650,000), including 80 of the 100 titles on the Nielsen UK...

The Kindle is no longer an e-books-only device; developers have just released two Kindle-ready games, thanks to the Kindle Development Kit (KDK). The KDK was launched earlier this year. At that time, we predicted more non-book apps, from productivity...

The Amazon Kindle has a new look, and the online retailer is launching another edition of its "Your Kindle Commercial Contest" in an effort to find the next fan-made ad for the e-reader. When Amazon hosted this same contest last year, Angela Kohler a...

Following recent price cuts on Amazon's Kindle 2 and Barnes & Noble's Nook, a new manufacturer is set to stir up even more competition in the e-reader pricing wars with the debut of a $99 color device this fall. The device, which weighs in at .42 lbs...

Scribner and Simon & Schuster Digital have released what they are calling their first-ever "enhanced e-book," Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, via Apple's iBookstore application. The enhanced e-book includes an original interview with the author and 27 hi...

Amazon predicts that it will sell more e-books than paperbacks by the end of next year, and that they will eclipse both paperback and hardcover sales combined shortly thereafter. "I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to...

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America's first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The "First to Know" series keeps you in the know on what's happening now in the world of social media and technology. Welcome to this morning's edition of "First...

Today, Amazon announced the newest generation of Kindle, its popular e-reader. As hardware is wont to do, the newest version of the Kindle has become smaller and lighter while retaining its 6-inch reading area. Contrast on the screen has improved by ...

Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist and detective novelist best known for his Millennium trilogy, has become the first author to sell more than 1 million e-books in the Kindle Store. The three books in the posthumously published trilogy -- The Girl w...

With the rise of e-book technologies such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple's iBooks, are we finally witnessing the end of the printed word? That's the question we posed this week in our Web Faceoff series. We wanted to know whether you, the readers, pr...

The Wylie Agency has signed a deal to bring the e-book editions of 20 classic titles, including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exclusively to Amazon's Kindle Store for two years, the company announced Thursday. Publisher...

Nook for Android hit the Market for free download today, and it has some nifty features that make e-book reading easy and clean, even for someone who would much rather breathe in the dust of a library book than stare fixedly at her Droid X. A little ...

Earlier today, Amazon announced that Kindle books are now outselling hardcovers. Are we witnessing the dawn of the e-book? That is the subject of today's Web Faceoff, our weekly series where we pit two web apps against each other in a competition for...

E-books have hit a significant milestone. In each of the last three months, Amazon reports that sales of books for Kindle have outpaced the sale of hardcover books, and that growth is only accelerating. In a statement, Amazon says, “over the past thr...

Borders, the second largest bookstore chain in the U.S., is launching its e-bookstore today, as well as reading apps for Blackberry and Android devices. The company also announced its aggressive plans to capture 17% of the e-book market by July 2011,...

It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey. The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2% on the i...

Barnes & Noble may have reported losses and been compelled to slash e-reader prices recently, but all is not lost, thanks to the company's decision to enter the e-book market this year. While sales at its physical retail locations declined by 4.8% ov...

Starting right now, Android owners can download a free Kindle app for reading e-books on their devices. With the newest class of 4.3-inch-screen Androids about to flood the market, we couldn't imagine a better time for releasing this app on the Andro...

Amazon has announced support for embedded video and audio clips in its Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The first books to take advantage of this new technology are Rick Steves's London and Together We Cannot Fail by Terry Golway. It's a ...

iBooks for iPhone is now available. Like its big brother on the iPad, iBooks is an elegant, easy-to-use e-reading solution. While we haven't had a ton of time with the pint-sized version of the app, our first impressions are very positive. The iBooks...

We are now entering a brave new world of e-reader price wars: Amazon has slashed the price of its Kindle to $189 from $259, and Barnes & Noble's Wi-Fi-only version of the Nook will retail for $149. The Kindle will still be available with 3G wireless ...

Facing increasing pressure from Apple's red-hot iPad, Amazon intends to fight back with a thinner, sharper and more responsive Kindle that will be introduced later this year. According to Bloomberg, Amazon will introduce a new version of its popular ...

It's official: Kindle is coming to an Android phone near you sometime this summer. The Kindle app is already available on the iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, and now Android will join the mobile lineup in the next few months. The free app comes with all...

Borders is finally -- finally -- jumping on the e-reading bandwagon. Earlier today, the brick and mortar book retailer unveiled its plans to launch its e-bookstore and reading apps next month. The company is also now taking pre-orders for the Kobo e-...

Did you know that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world? It passed the U.S. earlier this year and is now eclipsed only by China and India in terms of raw population. That mind-boggling statistic -- along wi...

Amazon has started rolling out the 2.5 software update for Kindle and Kindle DX to a small group of users -- a broad release planned for "late May 2010" -- and boy does it bring a lot of goodies. Perhaps the most notable new feature is the ability to...

It's been another exciting match here in our long-running Faceoff Series, where two competing services, apps or devices are pitted against each other for a fight to the finish. In this edition, we pitted relative newcomer Apple iBooks against its mos...

It's time once again for another edition of our long-running Faceoff Series, wherein we pit two similar or competing web services, gadgets, apps and more against each other in a head-to-head battle for supremacy amongst Mashable readers. This week it...

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